Background
P’an was born in Wcn-teng hsien near the eastern tip of the Shantung peninsula.
P’an was born in Wcn-teng hsien near the eastern tip of the Shantung peninsula.
He was educated locally.
He was first identified in 1947 as deputy director of the Administrative Office of the Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Border Region. This area had been one of the Communist “liberated areas,” which were, in effect, pockets of Communist control during the Sino-Japanese War. By 1949 P’an had been promoted to director, the Border Region by then having been placed under the North China People’s Government (a short-lived administrative division lasting from August 1948 to October 1949.
In 1949 the Communists made the region into a new province called Pingyuan, largely composed of parts of Honan and Shantung. P'an served from 1949 to 1952 as a member of the Pingyuan Provincial People’s Government and as political commissar of the Pingyuan Military District. From 1950 to 1952 he was also a member of the provincial government's Finance and Economics Committee as well as a deputy secretary subordinate to Wu Te, Ping-yuan's ranking Party secretary.
In the meantime, P'an had also taken part in the formation of the national government in Peking in September 1949. When the First CPPCC met in that month to bring the central government into existence, P’an attended as a delegate from the “North China Liberated Area.” During the meetings he served under Chou En-lai on an ad hoc committee to draft the Common Program of the CPPCC, the document that served as the constitution until a formal constitution was adopted in 1954.
Pingyuan was dissolved in November 1952 and the former provincial boundaries were approximately restored. In 1953, not long afterwards, P'an was transferred to Honan where he held posts similar to those he had held in Pingyuan. He was identified as the ranking Honan Party secretary by early 1953. From 1953 to mid-1958 he was also political commissar of the Honan Military District. In February 1955 he became a vice-chairman of the First Honan Provincial Committee of the CPPCC and was promoted to the chairmanship at some time before mid-1958. Concurrently, from February 1955 he held a seat on the Honan Provincial People’s Council.
At the Eighth National Congress of the CCP in September 1956, P’an was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee, apparently in reward for at least a decade of service in north-central China. However, less than two years later he was in serious political trouble, his career foundering on the rocks of the commune movement that was initiated in 1958.
Nothing further was heard of P’an for a most five years. He suddenly reappeared in November 1962 when he welcomed a delegation of the Polish Peasants Mutual Aid Agricultural Cooperatives to Peking. He was identified as acting chairman of the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives (ACFSMC), replacing Chang Ch'i-lung, a vice-chairman who had been de facto head of the organization since 1957 when Ch'eng Tzu-hua, the official chairman, had become otherwise occupied. The AC-FSMC is the principal mass organization of the cooperative movement and is one of the most important of the so-called “people’s” organizations. By July 1963 P’an formally replaced Ch'eng Tzu-hua as full chairman of the AC-FSMC, indicating that he had regained political favor in Peking. In late 1964 P’an was given still another post when he was named as a representative of the cooperatives to the Fourth CPPCC, which held its first session in December 1964-January 1965. At the close of this session he was named to the governing body of the CPPCC, the Standing Committee.
Honan was the province where the first model commune was established in April 1958. Known as the “Weihsing” (Sputnik) Commune, its alleged success was said to have encouraged the top Party leaders to establish communes throughout China as a major ingredient in the Great Leap Forward. These developments did not take place without internal Party struggles and disagreements. In certain provinces those on the winning side made the names of the opposition public, and thus it was easier to determine the contestants than at the national level where reports of the controversy were more guarded. The troubles in Honan were aired at the second session of the Eighth National Party Congress in May 1958. From the moment the session communique was published it was apparent that P'an was at the center of the trouble. Accusations brought against him made it seem that he had been in trouble almost from the time of his arrival in Honan in 1953. He was charged with having made the mistake of “right opportunism,” and he was also identified as the uformer first secretary of the Honan Party Committee,showing that punitive action had already been taken.
These charges were immediately followed by the convocation of the ninth enlarged session of the provincial Party committee in Honan, which met from June 9 to July 1, 1958. Wu Chih-p'u, a Honanese Communist who outranked P’an on the Central Committee (having been made a full committee member in 1956) and who was also the governor of Honan, presided as the new first secretary of the Honan Party Committee. In addition to P'an two other members of the Honan CCP Committee were sharply criticized. These were Yang Chueh, a secretary of the Honan Party Secretariat, and Wang T'ing-tung, deputy secretary-general of the Committee. The three men, it was said, had worked together in Pingyuan before coming to Honan and had formed an “anti-Party faction” in Honan as soon as they arrived there. In one of the reports at the session it was asserted that, although P’an had come to Honan in 1953, he had been running the Party Committee for only about two years because he had taken a “rest cure” from the “summer of 1954 to the spring of 1957.” The inference was that this was enforced inactivity because he had been in some political trouble. The comment is difficult to explain because P’an was not wholly inactive during the time, even by the facts of the report. It was during this very period (as already described) that he was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee, an honor not likely to be given to one then in political trouble. Furthermore, according to the criticisms made during the meeting, PJan had been actively opposed to the development of higher agricultural cooperatives in Honan from at least the winter of 1956 and possibly even earlier, another fact suggesting that he was not totally inactive in provincial politics at the time. It was alleged that he kept up his opposition all during 1957, even calling a fourth session of the provincial Party congress to try to impose his point of view. Apparently he felt that the province was too poor to support an acceleration in agricultural production and the peasants too apathetic toward collectivization to warrant pushing them into agricultural cooperatives so quickly. It was obvious from the charges that P'an must have been among those in Honan who favored a more conservative approach toward socialization.